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waiwai933♦Sep 17 '12 at 0:54

Hmm. Some of the awesomest questions are closed. This one is linked to from the flippin FAQ. What's the trend? Will migration ease? Will the close-gnomes mellow or militarize? Will "closed as off topic" become a badge of honor?
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BobStein-VisiBoneMar 15 '13 at 19:13

This is a great tool for finding out how words are actually used in different registers of English, ranging from informal spoken English to formal academic written English. In this answer I used it to find out if the word prepone was used with any regularity in American English (it is not). In this answer, I used it to compare incidences of “an historic” with “a historic”, to see if one is used orders of magnitude more frequently than the other (almost four to one in favor of “a historic”).

It is also useful for researching collocates—which words frequently go with other words. For example, in this answer I used it to compare “on the bus” with “in the bus” (“in the bus” is used sometimes when the bus is stationary). In this answer I used it the part-of-speech searching ability to compare how frequently none was used with a singular and plural verb forms (two to one in favor of plural).

Overall, COCA is a very useful tool for researching how the language is actually used, not only for debunking myths about language, but also for learning something new about how the language works.

Not Google Books, Language Tools, or even word trends. I mean the search engine. If I am curious about a sentence or spelling, I search for it. If the search returns interesting results similar to what I'm writing about, the sentence was good. If it returns badly-spelled pages about unrelated topics, the sentence is no good.

This book, which can be read for free using Google Books, has a lot of useful usage information that is based on research into how words are actually used (as opposed to how some usage writer would like them to be used). Their commentary was helpful to me in this answer regarding less vs. fewer. It was also useful during my research for this answer regarding usage of the word myself in non-reflexive contexts.

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.

This is a site for hearing pronunciations of words recorded by “ordinary” people. Many words have multiple recordings in different dialects, and each recording has votes on whether others think it is good or correct.

It's a lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. These "synsets" are interlinked. It's more rigorous than a normal Thesaurus, in that it tries to "pin down" every unique meaning of a word rather than just listing a bunch of synonyms with different shades of meaning.

It's a fascinating project. It's an attempt to be thorough and methodical about categorizing semantic meaning in English for use in computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Wordnik.com is an online dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content, some of it based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary.[Source: Wikipedia]

The software has a full dictionary and thesaurus for American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and global English. It also provides synonyms, antonyms, related words, text & audio pronunciations for words you look up.